The practice of drilling a hole in one's skull to somehow make one smarter or more enlightened.

It seems to me that if anybody is dumb enough to drill a hole in their own head in the first place, it probably couldn't do anything but help. But, hey. That might just be crazy talk.

I first heard of this from a bunch of crazy-ass physics majors I knew. They were trying to build a beowulf type system to model some particle physics experiment that was over my head. The computer work was interesting though, so I was trying to get in on it, at least at the fringes.
Picture a bunch of lunatic college kids sitting around a table in a room stacked with old computers, oscilloscopes, and other electronic devices, most of which appear to have been gutted in the late 50's. None of them really know what they are doing, but they're trying. There's Jim, Pat, Rob, and two Mikes, known as Good Mike and Bad Mike. Good Mike and Bad Mike are the jokers. Pat is the intellegent slacker. Rob, from what I can tell, seems to be a regular joe. Jim knows his shit pretty well, and is somewhat in charge. They keep mentioning trepanation, and laughing. Finally I break down and ask what it is.
Good Mike: "Mike, show him."
Bad Mike: (laughs and turns to the computer) "You're gonna love this."
He pulls up a picture of a woman, screaming, with a drill held against her forehead.
Me: "Holy shit."
Pat: "Yeah. We're trying to talk Jim into doing it, since he's our fearless leader."

Later, I looked up trepanation online and learned a bit more. I don't know what happened to those guys. I got caught up in other things, other projects, and never heard if their efforts came to fruition. However, if someday a group of five lunatic physicists takes over the world, and their leader has a hole in his noggin, I won't be too surprised.

The goal is to reveal the meninges, but not to cut it, as that would let the fluid that protects the brain go all over.

When drilling through the skull, one may hit a couple bone vessels. Also, when peeling back the scalp on top of the head, the person performing the operation should remember that the scalp is attached to the skull with some tissue, and the scalp should be marked for major veins, and remember that head wounds bleeda lot. The drilling is amplified by the skull resonating.

Of a couple accounts I've read, one person thinks his state of mind was not increased because of the procedure, but simply because he was paying an extreme amount of attention to the details of his changes, and that this attention did some of the things the procedure was supposed to do, and that the only effects are simply psychological, not physiological. Far from the magic some hope for.

Three of the "patients" appear to have survived the bloody procedure for an
extensive period of time. X-ray images show that the bones of the head had fully
healed after the operation. Two others at least remained alive for some time.
Only one, a ten year old girl, bled to death under the knife, presumably a result
of an accident.

Such a success rate, incredible for the Stone Age, indicates that the surgeon
had extensive knowledge of human anatomy. There are some major veins in the membrane
lining the inner skull which would quickly cause the patient to bleed to death if
punctured. It seems these vessels were intentionally avoided.

The surgeons also took great care in wielding their flint knives to cut the bone
of the skull. In order to avoid piercing the inner membrane after cutting through
the bone, they cautiously scraped the bone away at a shallow angle. This procedure
must have taken hours, perhaps days.

It is not clear how the patients were able to bear the intense pain of this
lengthy operation. Anaesthetics as such were unknown at the time, but it is possible
that poppy seeds were used for their soporific effect.

The success of these early trepanations would also not have been possible without
skills at disinfection, wound treatment and postoperative care. The skulls showed
no signs of infection. The prehistoric surgeons were probably aided by the fact
that freshly cut flint knives were essentially germ free.

From the anthropological finds, trepanation seems to have been a
common enough procedure. While some think it may have been practiced for reasons
of religion or ritual, it's also likely that trepanation was used to relieve
cranial pressure due to head injuries, and thus a useful and sometimes vital
medical treatment.

There is some modern-day evidence of the feasibility of trepanation under seemingly
primitive conditions: There is a Bantu tribe in Kenya where Stone Age style
trepanation procedures were known and practiced until recently to aid victims of
head injuries.

The modern trepanation movement was started by Dr. Bart Huges, a Dutch savant, in 1962. It was his belief that in standing upright, evolved man suffered from blood loss to the brain due to gravity. He also realised that by cutting a hole in his skull he could simulate a return to soft-headed infancy and a brain unrestricted by the cerebral membrane of later development; what this had to do with restoring the volume of blood to the brain is hard to say.

1965. Ibiza: (we skip Dr. Huges' time in a Dutch mental hospital)
Dr. Huges meets his disciple-to-be, English acid-head Joey Mellen. Joey later goes on to write a book called Bore-Hole("'This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high.") The book details Joey's two unsuccessful attempts to drill a hole through his skull with the help of friend Amanda Feilding and a hand-operated trepan. Third try was the charm, and he managed to open a small hole in the top of his skull. Later he used an electric drill to drill a hole in his forehead. Then he convinced Amanda to follow suit in 1970, making a film of the operation entitled Heartbeat in the Brain. She went on to stand for Parliament twice, her platform being that she would fight to get trepanation on the national health.

She now runs a charity called The Trepanation Trust, through whom interested parties can be put in contact with third-world surgeons willing to perform the operation.

It should also be noted that there are numerous cases in the psychiatric literature of schizophrenics drilling holes in their own heads in search of relief.

Let us also recall the 1981David Cronenberg film Scanners in which we are told villian Daryl Revok drilled a hole in his head in an attempt to quiet the overheard thoughts of others.

More detailed info on trepanation, photos etc. can be found at www.trepanation.com.

Modern surgeons' steel is clean, but treattyro trepanation with trepidation. Teen
mystics sing high of tuning third eyes
and praise their cordless doorknob drills
for opening new windows of perception
even as they lie blinded, bacterial feasts.